Probably just new and fresh, my buddy has a tron le and the flippers feel great to me.

Yeah, in most cases, the flippers on Tron and IM feel better than almost all the WMS games I play simply because they're so new and responsive. I guess since I play both so much I don't really notice the difference in feel anymore.

I always thought they feel weaker. I just think they do not handle wear as well.

There definitely was a change in stern flippers at some point - early 2000's stern flippers would, without much wear, begin to weaken when warm. This was most noticable on LoTR. At some point after that, Stern improved their flipper performance...

I remember that, there was a flipper problem with late Sega and early Stern games, where the flippers would seem underpowered if played non-stop. T3 has always seemed fine for me although strangely the top flipper on RBION can be a bit flaky even though all 4 work well on Elvis...weird.

I think so, I noticed that with Transformers too and they feel much stronger.